What does political resistance look like when the movement that might have named your experience does not yet exist? What happens when you live a poli
What does political resistance look like when the movement that might have named your experience does not yet exist? What happens when you live a political identity before there is a community that knows what to call it?
Fasia Jansen wanted to dance.
Before the politics, before the marches, before the songs that would travel through factory gates and peace camps, there was a Black German girl in Hamburg with an ordinary ambition. She wanted a life in motion. She wanted music. She wanted the stage.
Germany had other plans for her.
Fasia was born in 1929 to a white German mother and a Liberian father. She grew up in a country tightening itself around ideas of race, purity, belonging, and blood. By the time she was a teenager, those ideas had entered the smallest corners of daily life. They entered classrooms, workplaces, family homes, dance schools.
In 1943, she was forced out of her dance school under Nazi racial restrictions. The exclusion reached beyond one lost dream. The state had decided what kind of German she was allowed to be.
The following year, girls her age were being assigned compulsory service. For many, that meant work in German households. Fasia’s Blackness made even that placement unacceptable to Nazi authorities. A Black girl could not simply be sent into an “Aryan” home.
So she was sent elsewhere.
She ended up doing forced labor in a kitchen connected to a satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp, preparing and carrying food while prisoners and forced laborers moved through a world built on terror, exhaustion, hunger, and death. During this period, she became seriously ill. Heart trouble would stay with her for the rest of her life.
Somewhere inside that machinery, Fasia sang.
The detail matters because singing later became the way she entered public life. Her voice did not begin as a performance polished for applause. It emerged inside years when her choices had been narrowed by race, war, and state power.
Survivors often understand this before anyone explains it. A part of you can begin growing in the same season another part is being wounded. The gift is not created by the harm. The gift belongs to you. Violence does not own everything that happened while you were surviving it.
After the war, Fasia built a political life in the movements available to her. She moved through antifascist circles, labor struggles, peace activism, women’s organizing, and socialist politics. Her singing became inseparable from that work.
The Easter Marches for peace gave her a wider public presence. She sang in demonstrations and at political gatherings. Later, she stood with workers during industrial struggles in the Ruhr. When women at the Heinze photo laboratories fought for equal pay, Fasia wrote and performed songs in support of them. The women eventually won their case before the Federal Labour Court in 1981.
Her music was useful because it could do what political language sometimes could not. It could gather people. It could steady a room. It could return courage to women who were tired of explaining why they deserved fairness.
Fasia understood that struggle required memory as much as courage. She told women involved in labor organizing, “Wir müssen unsere Geschichte selber schreiben.” We have to write our own history.
She knew what happened when women left the telling of their lives to institutions that had barely noticed them.
That lesson reaches far beyond the archive. Women who have survived violence often spend years watching someone else’s version of events become the official one: the family’s version, the workplace’s version, the court’s version, the partner’s version. Fasia’s instinct points toward something quieter and steadier. Keep hold of your own record. Write down what happened. Name what mattered. Remember who helped you. Preserve what you learned about yourself. Your memory deserves a home outside the people who misunderstood you.
Fasia carried those instincts into women’s politics too. She resisted being turned into a convenient symbol of the “Third World.” Her political life was rooted in Germany, among the workers and women around her. In correspondence about her music, she wrote about wanting a song that addressed women’s “double exploitation.”
She was thinking about women’s burdens as lived realities: labor, inequality, political struggle, survival.
By the early 1980s, her activism had widened across borders. She and her partner and political collaborator Ellen Diederich traveled with women’s peace campaigns through Europe. They joined marches, created meeting spaces, and helped build encounters among women from different countries.
When arguments became too sharp, Fasia sometimes reached for her guitar.
Diederich remembered that singing could interrupt the tension long enough for people to return to one another.
There is wisdom in that too. Women who have lived through harm are often trained by experience to remain inside conflict until someone wins. Survival can make every disagreement feel like a danger that must be solved immediately. Fasia’s practice suggests another possibility. Sometimes the next right move is to change the temperature of the room. Pause the argument. Make tea. Walk outside. Sing if you sing. Call someone kind. Regulation can come before resolution.
In 1985, Fasia and Diederich traveled to Nairobi for the United Nations World Conference on Women.
By then Fasia had spent decades in German political life. She had organized as a worker’s ally, a peace activist, a feminist, an antifascist, and a Black woman moving through movements whose central language was usually something other than Black German identity.
At almost the same historical moment, younger Black women in West Germany were beginning to build something Fasia had never possessed when she was young: a political community organized explicitly around being Black and German.
Audre Lorde’s years in West Berlin became one catalyst. Black German women including May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, Dagmar Schultz and others began finding one another, recording their histories, and creating language for experiences German society had long treated as isolated. “Farbe bekennen” appeared in 1986. ADEFRA and other Black German organizations emerged from this period.
Fasia’s life helps us understand what existed before that moment.
Black women’s political life in Germany had already been happening in peace movements, unions, antifascist work, women’s campaigns, local struggles, kitchens, factories, marches, friendships, and songs.
What changed in the 1980s was the presence of a collective home where Black German experience itself could become the organizing center.
Fasia spoke about this distinction years later when Tina Campt interviewed her in 1992. She said she had never called herself Afro-German. When she was young, there had been no Afro-German association and no corresponding collective consciousness available to her. German society still made it clear that she was not fully accepted as German.
That is the sentence that makes her life open. She had spent decades inside politics before there was a durable Black German political community in which she could place that part of herself collectively.
For many women, that experience will feel familiar in another form. You may know what it is to live through something before you have language for it. You may have survived coercion before knowing the word coercion. You may have carried family responsibilities before anyone called them care work. You may have felt unsafe before anyone taught you to trust that feeling.
Language often arrives after experience.
Community can arrive later still.
Your life was real before you knew what to call it.
By the time younger Black German women began organizing, they did reach toward Fasia. Surviving evidence shows contact. Letters from younger Black women remained in her papers. Helga Emde, connected to the Afro-German women’s movement, addressed an unpublished poem to her. One younger woman wrote that Fasia’s political commitment had renewed her own relationship to Germany and strengthened her belief that a person could fight injustice in the country where she lived even while being treated as an unwanted minority.
The evidence gives us contact, recognition, and respect. It leaves room for difference between generations.
Fasia had already found her political road.
The younger women were building another. Their histories touched. That is enough.
History does not need a perfect family tree to matter.
Fasia died in 1997 after a lifetime marked by the heart problems that began during the war. Germany had already honored her with the Federal Cross of Merit. Decades earlier, her attempt to receive compensation for health damage related to Nazi persecution had been rejected.
Those facts belong beside each other.
The state that once failed to recognize the full meaning of what had happened to her later decorated the woman she became.
Fasia’s life leaves women with something stronger than a lesson about triumph.
A woman can spend years without the language, community, recognition, or justice she deserved and still know what she knows.
She can find her people late.
She can build political meaning from an imperfect inheritance.
She can refuse to let institutions be the only authors of her memory.
And when another generation finally creates words for what she lived through, her story does not become obsolete.
It becomes evidence that women were already surviving, organizing, singing, writing, warning, loving, and fighting long before history learned what to call them.
You gotta check out the videos on Youtube of her singing. Speaking out in more ways than one.